Marshall McLuhan - The Gutenberg Galaxy (1962)

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The alphabet is an aggressive and militant absorber and transformer of culture, as Harold Innis was the first to show.

Marshall McLuhan
Throughout Finnegans Wake Joyce specifies the Tower of Babel as the tower of Sleep, that is, the tower of the witless assumption, or what Bacon calls the reign of the Idols.

Marshall McLuhan
Every technology contrived and outered by man has the power to numb human awareness during the period of its first interiorization.

Marshall McLuhan
In antiquity and the Middle Ages reading was necessarily reading aloud.

Marshall McLuhan
Until more than two centuries after printing nobody discovered how to maintain a single tone or attitude throughout a prose composition.

Marshall McLuhan
Typography extended its character to the regulation and fixation of languages.

Marshall McLuhan
The anguish of the third dimension is given its first verbal manifestation in poetic history in King Lear.

Marshall McLuhan
African audiences cannot accept our passive consumer role in the presence of film.

Marshall McLuhan
The uniformity and repeatability of print created the political arithmetic of the seventeenth century and the hedonistic calculus of the eighteenth.

Marshall McLuhan
Renaissance Italy became a kind of Hollywood collection of sets of antiquity, and the new visual antiquarianism of the Renaissance provided an avenue to power for men of any class.

Marshall McLuhan
Rabelais offers a vision of the future of print culture as a consumer's paradise of applied knowledge.

Marshall McLuhan
For the oral man the literal text contains all possible levels of meaning.

Marshall McLuhan
With Gutenberg Europe enters the technological phase of progress, when change itself becomes the archetypal norm of social life.

Marshall McLuhan
The Greeks encountered the confusion of tongues when numbers invaded Euclidean space.

Marshall McLuhan
The medieval student had to be paleographer, editor, and publisher of the authors he read.

Marshall McLuhan
The world of the Greeks illustrates why visual appearances cannot interest people before the interiorization of alphabetic technology.

Marshall McLuhan
Bacon's Adam is a medieval mystic and Milton's a trade union organizer.

Marshall McLuhan
The Greeks invented both their artistic and scientific novelties after the interiorization of the alphabet.

Marshall McLuhan
Non-literate societies cannot see films or photos without much training.

Marshall McLuhan
Sheer visual quantity evokes the magical resonance of the tribal hoard. The box office looms as a return to the echo chamber of bardic incantation.

Marshall McLuhan
Does the interiorization of media such as letters alter the ratio among our senses and change mental processes?

Marshall McLuhan
Cervantes confronted typographic man in the figure of Don Quixote.

Marshall McLuhan
Primitivism has become the vulgar cliche of much modern art and speculation.

Marshall McLuhan
The interface of the Renaissance was the meeting of medieval pluralism and modern homogeneity and mechanism – a formula for blitz and metamorphosis.

Marshall McLuhan
The sheer increase in the quantity of information movement favoured the visual organization of knowledge and the rise of perspective even before typography.

Marshall McLuhan
Schizophrenia may be a necessary consequence of literacy.

Marshall McLuhan
Civilization gives the barbarian or tribal man an eye for an ear and is now at odds with the electronic world.

Marshall McLuhan
Print, in turning the vernaculars into mass media, or closed systems, created the uniform, centralizing forces of modern nationalism.

Marshall McLuhan
The increase of visual stress among the Greeks alienated them from the primitive art that the electronic age now reinvents after interiorizing the unified field of electric all-at-onceness.

Marshall McLuhan
Dantzig explains why the language of number had to be increased to meet the needs created by the new technology of letters.

Marshall McLuhan